open-design

Open Design is a local-first tool that turns your AI coding agent into a design studio. Point it at Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or any of twenty-plus agents it supports, and it generates UI prototypes, dashboards, slide decks, images, and even video, all on your own machine, with no proprietary cloud in the middle. It's Apache 2.0 and positions itself as the open answer to tools like Vercel's v0 and Figma Make.

The recent work has pushed it well past a simple prototype generator. It now ships with 150-plus built-in design systems, so outputs can auto-adopt a specific brand's tokens and look, plus a library of prebuilt skills for common jobs and a growing plugin marketplace. Video comes through HeyGen. Under the hood it's a Next.js and Electron app you can run as a desktop install or deploy with Docker.

Setup is moderate, Node and pnpm, more moving parts than a single CLI but not painful. You bring your own model keys, and the media features lean on outside services like HeyGen that carry their own costs. It's genuinely useful if you want AI-generated design work without handing your prompts and outputs to a hosted platform. Solo builders and small teams experimenting with agent-driven design are the sweet spot.

The catch is maturity. This is still a 0.x project moving fast, with a broadening scope and a healthy pile of open issues. The brand-design-system layer is brand new. If you need something stable and supported today, v0, Framer AI, or Lovable will feel more finished, at a subscription cost. If you want local-first and open, and you can tolerate the rough edges, Open Design is one of the few real options.